The Shawnee Sacred
Slab came to my knowledge in August when Hal Sherman gave me a web site reference
to the picture shown on the right.
A clearer drawing with better labeling is shown on the left. I was immediately attracted to the
symbol of heaven, which appeared to be a white man’s house. But what is really the relationship of
the Shawnee Sacred Slab to Norse in Ancient America?

The Shawnee Sacred Slab is
associated with the Shawnee, Tecumseh.
Legend says Tecumseh ordered his brother to prepare counting sticks. The
counting sticks were sent with a copy of the Shawnee Sacred Slab to many
chiefs. The symbols on the
Sacred Slab copy explained two stories.
One story, which was meant for curious white people, was an innocent
tale of passage to heaven. The
legend says that the second meaning was secret call to assemble for war when
the earth shook.

According to the legend,
the chiefs counted the next to last stick on Nov 16, 1811, when a large comet
lit the night sky. Then the chiefs
cut the last counting stick into thirty pieces. One piece to count each day. Thirty days later, on Dec. 16, 1811 the first of four major
shocks of the Madrid Earthquake occurred.
The Tecumseh war began shortly afterward.

Other than for Tecumseh, the Shawnee
legend does not really say who, when, where, or why the Shawnee Sacred Slab was
made in the first place.

A close examination reveals that
the drawing omits certain marks seen in the picture. One mark is what seems to be a tiny boat on the “lightning”
symbol. The “boat,”
appearing to ride the waves, might imply that the symbol was meant to say;
“across a large sea.”

There are other questions. The circle with a line through it is
repeated twice with different meanings.
The cross is more like St. Ninian’s cross than the four corners of the
earth.

Ten (10) of the
sixteen (16) symbols, including the heavenly house, on the Sacred Slab can be
found in the Tifinag alphabet (See
Fig. 1-2 of Bronze Age America by
Barry Fell, 1952) Four other
symbols appear to be Ogmi letters.
In Fig 1-3, Barry Fell illustrates Tifinag and Ogmi letters used in the
same pictograph. Barry wrote, “The
language is recognizable as an archaic form of Old Norse.”

Perhaps the original Slab was
created in the Bronze Age (>1200 BC) by Ancient Norse travelers, who were
using Tifinag and Ogmi alphabets.
The major calamities that followed: a comet storm (1200 BC), Krakatoa’s
explosion (535), the Little Ice Age (1300s), and possibly, the Black Death
(1400s), may have swept away original knowledge of the meaning of the symbols.

Then, maybe, a wise shaman may
have created another story sometime in the recent past to explain the Shawnee
Sacred Slab.

Never the less, the Tifinag and
Ogmi symbols remain to indicate that the Norse were in Ancient America.